The 2010 Board of Directors

Raymond Hettinger has been a contributor to the Python core for 10
years, and has worked on many of the standard library modules,
including itertools, sets, and collections. He regularly speaks at
Python and Open Source conferences around the world. He is currently
working on an update to the Python Cookbook, as well as the Python
Swallowed Whole book project. In 2009, he lead an ongoing effort to
ensure that we have signed contributor agreements from all
contributors to Python core or the standard library. Raymond is
Director of Technology at SauceLabs and is a Certified Public
Accountant.

Steve Holden joined the PSF in 2003, its Board of Directors in
2004, and became Chairman in 2008. He founded and chaired the first
Python community conference, establishing PyCon as the premier event
for Pythonistas in North America. He again chaired PyCon in 2004
and 2005. He received the Frank Willison Memorial Award in 2007
for his services to the Python community. He is the author of Python
Web Programming and for two years wrote the monthly "Random Hits"
column in Python Magazine. Steve runs Holden Web LLC, a consulting
and training company with a strong Python focus.

Marc-André Lemburg been working with Python since 1993 and on
Python since 1997 as core developer. His major contributions include
the design for Unicode integration, the codecs subsystem, pybench, and
the platform module. From 2002-2004 Marc-André served on the PSF
board and was PSF vice president in 2003-2004. He started the Public
Support Committee (PSC) as a way of looking for income sources for the
PSF. He also initiated the work of having signed Python contributor
agreements for all contributors. Marc-André's company eGenix.com
provides Python project support and produces several Python extension
libraries for working with dates, text processing, and ODBC
connectivity.

David Mertz is currently Chair of the PSF's Trademarks Committee,
and served as Vice Chair last year. He proposed the adoption of a
2009 diversity statement by the Board. He is a developer and
author, most notably of Text Processing in Python and the IBM
developerWorks' column Charming Python. He is also co-authoring the
updated 3rd Edition of The Python Cookbook. As CTO and board member
of the Open Voting Consortium, David advocated for the use
of Python to create an Open Source voting platform. For the last
couple years, David has been consulting for D.E.Shaw Research, builders of *Anton*, the world's
fastest supercomputer for doing computational biochemistry.

Doug Napoleone has developed with Python for the past 10 years and
has been active in the community for 7 years. He is the lead
developer of the PyCon-tech project, the application for managing most
aspects of the PyCon US conference. He is also active on several
organizing committees for PyCon US. Doug has worked with and helped
organize three local Python user groups.

Jesse Noller is a prominent Python-dev team member, especially
noted for his contributions to the multiprocessing module. He has
been working with Python for over five years, on a variety of projects
including distributed systems and automation frameworks. He writes on
his blog and has contributed to Python
Magazine as both author and editor. He also chaired the PyCon 2010 Program Committee. Jesse is a Senior
Engineer at Nasuni Corporation.

Tim Peters has served on the Board since its inception. He
corresponded extensively with Guido about Python's design before its
first public release in the early 1990s, and contributed to many areas
of the language implementation over the years, especially to
optimization of time-critical paths. Other contributions include the
first POSIX thread implementation, the first Python port to a 64-bit
machine, the Emacs Python mode, The Zen of Python, SpamBayes, doctest, and Python's
sorting algorithms.

Allison Randal is architect of the Parrot VM, as well as the lead developer of Pynie (an implementation of Python 3 on
Parrot). In addition to sitting on the PSF board, Allison chairs the
board of the Parrot Foundation, and is on the board of the Perl
Foundation. In 2005, together with Dave Neary of GNOME, she founded
FLOSS Foundations to bring together
leaders of open source foundations to share resources and knowledge.
Allison is currently studying at the University of Bristol in the UK.

Jeff Rush first became involved with Python in 1997 by porting it
to OS/2. He started the Dallas Ft. Worth Pythoneers user group in 2005 and co-chaird PyCon
in Dallas in 2006 and 2007. Jeff worked for the PSF as Python
Advocacy Coordinator in 2006-2007. He frequently gives talks at
Python and other Open Source conferences and user group meetings.

Greg Stein is one of the original members who incorporated the
PSF, and is a prior Director. In addition to his many contributions
to Python, he blogs, works on several
Apache projects, the WebDAV specification, and Subversion. He is a
member of the Apache Software Foundation's
board of directors, and was its chair from 2002-2007.

James Tauber has been working with Python for 12 years and open
source for 17 years. He is lead developer of Pinax as well as a Django core developer. He
was a mentor for the PSF's participants in the Google Summer of Code program from 2005-2007, and an
administrator for the project from 2007-2008. He is a frequent
conference speaker and currently sits on the PSF Trademarks Committee.
James is CEO of Eldarion, a web startup that uses Django and Pinax and
helps others do the same.

Martin v. Löwis is a Python core developer. Over the last year,
he has been focusing on infrastructure issues such as hardware
upgrades, PyPI, the bug tracker, and acting as a liason to the PSF's
hosting provider XS4ALL.

Gloria Willadsen has been working with Python for over ten years.
She has written online and in articles for The Python Papers and Python Magazine. She also had a
regular column called "I Love Python" for DevChix. Gloria teaches tutorials at conferences
around the world and has started two apprenticeship groups to teach
Python tools and techniques to developers.

The Python Software Foundation

The mission of the Python Software Foundation is to promote,
protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to
support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international
community of Python programmers.

About the Board

PSF Directors are elected annually and are responsible for managing
the business of the foundation, as outlined in the bylaws. They fulfill two
responsibilities:

Completing or overseeing administrative tasks related to the legal
standing of the Foundation. These include responding to trademark
or licensing queries and monitoring the Foundation's financial
health.

A director's specific duties depend on the office and any
sub-committee memberships held. The board meets monthly via IRC.
Minutes from the meetings are available online. Most Directors
are volunteers, although some Officer positions (Treasurer and
Secretary) do receive a nominal salary.

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

At their April 12 meeting, the PSF Board approved grants for two PyCon
conferences.

PyCon Italia

PyCon Italia Quattro is scheduled for May
7-9 in in the old city centre of Florence. The organizers are
planning three tracks of talks and anticipate more than 400 delegates.
The PSF Board approved a grant of $4000US to help with conference
expenses.

Kiwi PyCon

Kiwi PyCon is being organized by the New
Zealand Python Users Group (NZPUG) and will be
held November 20-12 in Waitangi, New Zealand. There will be a series
of traditional scheduled talks, as well as BarCamp-style sessions.
The PSF Board approved a grant of NZ$1,000 to defray expenses.

Updated: Organizers for other conferences who would like to apply
for a grant should send details of their request to the board at
psf@python.org.

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

The Python Software Foundation is soliciting nominations for the
second quarter 2010 community awards.

The PSF Community Awards are a way for the PSF Board of Directors to
recognize contributions by community members that significantly
improve the Foundation's fulfillment of its mission and benefits the
broader Python community.

Recognition takes the form of an award certificate plus one of the
following:

A cash award of $500; or

Free registration at PyCon, with optionally a contribution of up
to $500 towards the recipient's travel and accommodation
expenses.

Awards are normally made quarterly, although the Board may choose to
consider awards at other times. Membership in the Foundation is not
required to receive an award.

PSF members should submit confidential nominations to the Board by
sending email to psf@python.org.

Wednesday, April 07, 2010

As there is desire for more communication from the board I thought I would take the time to summarize the major activities of last year.

This dated list is not complete, and reflects only the formal published board resolutions.

February

Started the trademarking process in various foreign markets for "Python" (currently on hold for financial reasons).

March

Ran PyCon 2009.
Funded a laptop purchase for the PSF administrator.

April

Supported PyCon Italia with a $3,500 grant.
PSF Community Service Award to Stephan Deibel.
Funded Vern Ceder's attendance to present Python paper at NECC with a grant of $500.

May

Supported EuroPython 2009 with a $6,000 grant.
Offered support for a grant application to the Mellon Foundation.
Supported Libre Graphics Meeting 2009 with an $800 grant to the GNOME Foundation.

June

Supported SciPy 2009 with a $10,000 grant to enable student attendance.
Funded ($2,000) research into support for video recording of user group meetings.
Published the Trademark Policy under a Creative Commons license.
PSF Community Service Award to Sean Reifschneider.
Funded ($800) materials for the first ever Python booth at OSCON.

July

Supported PyCon Poland 2009 with a $2,500 grant.

August

Supported PyCon Kiwi with a $750 grant.
Supported PyCon Argentina 2009 with a $750 grant.
Supported DjangoCon 2009 with a $750 grant.
Undertook to move to a professional membership administration system

September

Modified mission statement to reflect a desire for greater diversity.

October

PSF Community Service Awards to Noufail Ibrahim and Barry Warsaw.
Formally adopted the PSF Diversity Statement.
Lent formal support to the European FOSS-ORI organization.

November

Recommended SEO Moves for sponsor membership.
Supported PyTexas Unconference 2009 with a $150 grant.
Supported DjangoSki with a grant of $750.
Supported the Blender Foundation with of up to $1,500 Euros by matching other funding.
Appointed Wendroff Accountants to provide monthly management accounts and other accounting services including annual tax return.

Review

Although the above apparently represents just twelve hours of board meetings, of necessity many of the actions detailed have required a lot of time in preparatory work such as discussions and negotiations. I am grateful to my fellow directors and the other officers for the work they have put in to try and develop the Foundation.

Besides this formal stuff I personally have continued outreach work to such user groups as I have been able to attend, and I would encourage other directors to do the same. At every meeting I have found a groundswell of interest in and support for the Foundation's activities that is both gratifying and humbling.

I have also undertaken preparatory investigations to allow us to undertake "fiscal sponsorship", a scheme that will effectively let user groups and other affiliated organizations make use of the Foundation's charitable status by raising funds in a way that allows donors a tax deduction without the need for formal incorporation as a 501(c)3 or similar. I hope that this will also allow the Foundation to start sponsoring sprint activities that will get developers together at crucial times to ensure that development velocity can be maintained.

We have produced the first issue of a quarterly newsletter (small quantities were available at PyCon) which will be the primary communications channel with the new associate members I hope we will shortly see swelling our ranks (and our coffers). Without the preparatory work to bring the membership management system on-line this development would not have been practical.

While the Foundation is not yet as organized as I would like to see it we have made some kind of start in a new direction. The financial problems of 2009 did not make things easy. Much remains to be done, but overall we are much better placed to move forward than we were a year ago.

The mission of the Python Software Foundation is to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers.